


Ink and Graphite

by AugustinianSeptember



Category: If We Were Villains - M.L. Rio
Genre: Fluff and Angst, tbh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-27
Updated: 2018-07-27
Packaged: 2019-06-17 03:46:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,117
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15452679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AugustinianSeptember/pseuds/AugustinianSeptember
Summary: James was always Oliver's favourite artistic subject.





	Ink and Graphite

**Author's Note:**

> This was inspired by a sketch I saw on tumblr (https://augustinianseptember.tumblr.com/post/175790240192), which reminded me of James and sent me off on headcanons about Oliver sketching him during classes. Fluff and a little bit of heartbreaking <3

The air was heady with the aromatic mist of tea, thick with chalk dust. We each held a teacup in the mid-autumn gold-gloom. Our grips would always be initially delicate, but began to threaten the brittle china as discussion escalated.

“Oh, _please,_ ” Meredith said, “Can we not get through a single discussion of _Hamlet_ without bringing up the Oedipal interpretation?”

“You’re saying it’s useless?”

“She’s saying it’s an _anachronism,_ ” Pip backed her up, “Unless you choose to believe that Shakespeare was several hundred years before his time in terms of psychoanalysis.”

“Shakespeare’s plays are often characterised by anachronisms,” I said thoughtfully, but hastened to add, “That’s not to say that I agree with the Oedipal view, though.”

“Way to backtrack, Oliver,” Alexander smirked, and I mumbled a forlorn _shut up_. If we weren’t in Frederick’s class, it would be considerably more colourful, and since we both knew that the language fell flat.

“I’m only saying that we shouldn’t be snobbish enough to tie ourselves exclusively to the ideas of the period.”

Richard was the one spearheading the Oedipal view of _Hamlet_ – the one and only, in fact. Where Alexander played the devil in performance, Richard played devil’s advocate in discussion. This parallel casting of the villain should somehow have placed them in parallel, too, but it didn’t.

“And you’d know everything about being snobbish, wouldn’t you,” Meredith challenged him. They’d had a spat that morning, an impassioned one, that the rest of us were too far away to hear. Some of the animosity obviously lingered. Richard made a face.

As they began again, my eyes shifted to James, who was listening, but remained quiet. Thinking – his fingers curled round the handle of his cup, lifted halfway to his lips, only he wasn’t drinking.  
I rested my chin on my hand, and idly began to sketch him. The catch of his teeth on his lip, partway to biting; the way the steam from his tea made the ends of his hair form more defined half-curls.

The sketch was unfinished when he straightened, gave the others a look of calmly anticipatory triumph, and said:

“There are several reasons why you’re all wrong.”

The argument began again in earnest, and the set line of James’ mouth and the abandonment of his cup gave me no chance to finish.

-

“Alcohol, fairy lights, speakers, paper cups…” Pip pointed to each item as she reeled them off. Everyone had charge of something, except for me, annotating in a corner.

“Are we missing anything?”

“I doubt it. Once they’re drunk they won’t know the difference, anyway, so whatever it is, I say fuck it,” Alexander supplied philosophically. He reclined, taking a swig of whiskey.

Wren: “Have you opened that bottle _already_? Alex!”

Alexander: “ _O thou invisible spirit of wine, if thou hast no name to be known by, let us call thee devil_.”

Pip: “I don’t think that line was intended to be said with so much…relish.”

I snorted and kicked at James’ feet. He was a little too far away, and my toes skimmed his ankle.

“In need of some help there, mine own _sweet prince_?”

He looked at me in some surprise. Probably he thought he was being subtle with his frustration with the fairy lights, still ostensibly a tangled and bundled mess in his lap.

“I’ll work it out. Eventually,” he said after a beat.

“Oh, James, you’re useless.” Wren had mercy on him and moved to take the lights with an air of indulgence, as one might take pity on a spoilt child.

Even as she worked the knots out with deft fingers, James held a small frown, like he was concentrating. I sketched the downturn of his mouth and the precision of his dark hair beside the mess of lights.

Pip’s authoritative voice faded out into a hum as James’ shape took form across and in between the words of _The Tempest_.

-

“Hey, Oliver.”

“Yeah?”

It was dim and silvery at the top of the Castle. There were moments, maybe seconds, before the sun would begin to rise. James and I both squinted in the faint light, but neither of us would to tarnish it with electric lamps.

“You’re good at drawing, you know.”

“When have you ever seen me draw?”

I turned to find James standing just behind me, holding my copy of Hamlet open in one hand. He was smiling triumphantly, like he’d stumbled upon a big secret.

In a way he had, I thought, my eyes catching on his own likeness on the page.

“I sketch sometimes,” I replied stiffly, and continued my hunt for an uncrumpled shirt.

“It’s good. You shouldn’t be shy about it.” Both warmth and laughter intruded on his voice.

“Yeah, I guess.”

There was no other reply I could give, short of trying to explain to him how imperfect the image was that he held. It was James, but also James without quite the right gravity in his eyes and lips. That was why I always found myself recreating him in lines, over and over again, in a compulsion to get it right, this time.

“You know, if you ever wanted me to pose for you…”

James arched an eyebrow at me, and draped himself artfully against an oak bedpost. I smile, he laughs; a strange tension dissipated, but only externally. My chest remained tight. His acting was readable in his limbs: by some supernatural knowledge, he knew just how to arrange them to catch each angle in the dawn light.

“You’re as bad as Alexander.”

“Oof, Oliver, that _hurts_ ,” James retorted, clutching at his chest. He dropped the pose only to take on a new one, oriented toward the window, “ _But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?_ ”

“That would be the sun, which means we’re going to be late if you don’t start helping me find an ironed shirt.”

James sighed, “Take one of mine.”

-

During one of the many of my first nights out of prison, when everything was known to me, I flicked through my old books. They were still familiar, as though I had carelessly disregarded them only the day before.

The cracks in their spines and soft dog-eared pages were comfortable against my fingertips; my handwriting still looked the same, even so many years later.

There were sketches of James in blank covers and in some places upon the words themselves. James drinking whiskey from the bottle, James at the end of the pier, James looking at me like he couldn’t quite believe I was real.

I returned his expression.

For all I knew, now, he continued to exist only in the pages of my old books, in rough lines of ink and graphite.


End file.
